


Catastrophe Theory

by serenityfails, whitachi



Category: Original Work
Genre: Cunnilingus, F/M, Illustrated, Nightmares, Zombies
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-23
Updated: 2017-08-23
Packaged: 2018-12-19 00:37:07
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,587
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11886228
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/serenityfails/pseuds/serenityfails, https://archiveofourown.org/users/whitachi/pseuds/whitachi
Summary: Collected all in one place, the art and fic snippets making up the story of Rufus, a doctor, and Amelia, a soldier, two survivors in a zombie apocalypse who fall in love and kiss and stuff.





	Catastrophe Theory

**Author's Note:**

> Entirely inspired by me telling Katie a bedtime story about Richard Armitage and Ellen Page teaming up to fight zombies. Height Difference Zombie Party, we called it before giving it a title. Originally appeared [on tumblr.](http://serenity-fails.tumblr.com/tagged/catastrophe+theory)

* * *

He couldn’t tell how long he’d been running. That was a thing about the brain, about its fear response, about adrenaline, that you lost your proper sense of time. He could have been running for thirty seconds or ten minutes for all he knew; none of it mattered except the burning in his lungs, the thudding of his heart, and how far he could get before any of it made him stop. He hoped it would be far enough.

Rufus had had a weapon but he’d lost it, like a bloody idiot. He’d turned the corner and come face first with a small gathering of the dead and he’d just dropped the crowbar, his fingers gone numb to let it clang on the floor. He could try to tell himself it was for the best – even when he was fighting for his life against those who were most assuredly dead and most assuredly monsters, even one hard blow at a face that had so recently been human was enough to make him sick after. He was better off running, he told himself, but he knew eventually he’d run out of routes to take.  
  
There was a house coming up on the road he was running along, one with a fence and a front porch with a beautiful six whole steps. The dead maneuvered better than the average Dalek, but it would still give him more time. He took the stairs two at a time and launched himself at the front door, slamming into it with the full brunt of his weight. He’d treat his battered and bruised shoulder later and realize that perhaps he should have simply tried the handle first.  
  
He tried to close the door behind him but the hinges were shot now; it shut but hung oddly, not connecting to any sort of safe seal. It was no matter; he wasn’t taking shelter here. He had just enough time to catch his breath for a moment. He put a hand on the stairway bannister, and then rest his head on top of it, nearly doubling over as he gasped for breath.  
  
Time still wasn’t quite working. His heart wouldn’t slow. There was smoke on the air that he could smell coming in from the battered door; that bus that had overturned had caught fire. He brought the sleeve of his shirt over his mouth for a moment, breathing in the smell of old sweat instead of it for a while. Blood was still rushing in his ears when he could breathe easy again, but it wasn’t enough to distract him from the sound of footfalls from the back of the house.  
  
He straightened up and saw a young woman staring at him. For just a flash he thought her a child, but he saw children where they were not far too often. No, she was small, not even tall enough to reach the top of his shoulder, but she was an adult, and she was _alive_ ; her face and clothes were marked with blood and dirt, but he could see the rise and fall of breath in her chest. He opened his mouth to speak to her, and that was when her eyes went hard and she lifted up the shotgun that he had entirely failed to note she held at her side.  
  
“Get _down_ ,” she barked out, and he was no man to ignore the command of a woman with a gun. He dropped down into a crouch and she strode forward, the barrel of the gun nearly caressing the top of his head before she fired it, leaving his ears ringing and an acrid smell in the air. She fired twice more and then knelt herself, wrapping a small hand around his wrist and pulling him. As she tugged him along Rufus looked behind him, to where the door had come off its hinges, and the twitching corpses of three of the dead littered the foyer. They were getting better with stairs.  
  
She ran fast, short legs pounding the ground so rapidly he stumbled a few times trying to keep up. Her hold on his hand was steadfast and tight, though, as she lead him through back gardens and kicked down gate doors. She stopped in front of a small shed that had been grown over with ivy and moss – someone’s old bomb shelter, it looked like. She opened the door and pointed. “In, get in now!” He ducked his head and went inside.  
  
It was musty and cramped inside, but the walls seemed to be sturdy concrete, and the door she closed behind them was steel. She kept the gun pointed at him, though. “Have you been bitten?” She was American. Made the gun make more sense.  
  
“No, no, no,” he said, and lifted up his arms, rotating to show his unbloodied body. “No, I’m clean.”  
  
She kept the gun trained on him for a few more moments, and then sighed and let it drop. “If you’re talking and can run like that, yeah, I figure you must be in good shape.” She sat down on the cot in the corner of the room and rubbed a hand over her face, leaving sweaty smears of dirt across her forehead before brushing her dark hair out of her face. She was really quite pretty, Rufus noted, and then felt a general distaste for himself at even thinking about something like that in this sort of situation. “So, hi, I’m glad neither of us just died.”  
  
“So…” Even if the number of days since the last time he’d spoken to a living person were not that great, the length of it felt vast. “So am I. Thank you.” He felt awkward, looming, towering, and most of all, tired. He sat down on the twinned cot at the other corner of the room. She produced a bottle of water from a palette near her and tossed it towards him. He picked it up from where it thudded on the cot and drank a third of it in heavy gulps.  
  
“What’d you do to get them after you like that?” she asked.  
  
He looked down the neck of the bottle of water. Too much too fast and he’d be ill. “Existed?”  
  
She let out a breathy laugh. “Yeah, that’ll do it.” She leaned back on the cot some, supporting her weight with her hands behind her, but something about the motion made her grimace, made her hiss a little in pain. Now that he had more of his wits about him, Rufus could really look at her; most of that which marked her was dirt, but the dark stain on her shirt was most unmistakeably blood.  
  
“Were you…” he said, and looked up to her eyes. She seemed well, she seemed sharp, she seemed alive. He’d been fooled before. “…bitten?”  
  
She frowned, then looked down at her stomach and shook her head with a sigh. “No, this isn’t…” She pulled up the fabric to show her stomach and the rather impressive and nasty amount of scraped flesh there. “I got clumsy climbing up a tree a few days ago. It keeps bleeding again when I move around too much. I was hoping I’d find some bandages or something in one of those houses, but…” She shrugged. “Some days are luckier than others.”  
  
If any days could be called lucky now. “Actually, ah, I…” The satchel he carried had never left his shoulder. Weapons would fall out of his hand like oiled marbles; he was wired for different instincts. “I have some.” Her brows knit together as she looked at him, and at the bag. “I’m a doctor.”  
  
Her eyes went wide. “No shit?” she said, and he nodded, pulling out a roll of gauze from his bag to prove himself. “Okay, maybe a lucky day after all.”  
  
Rufus stood up, approaching her slowly. “I could help, if you’d like.”  
  
She shrugged out of the jacket she wore, showing slim but clearly strong arms, and tugged up her shirt high on her ribcage. “Hell, yes, please, fix my sexy wounds.” He simply had no response to that. She shook her head. “Nevermind, don’t worry about it. First aid would be very appreciated.”  
  
He retrieved disinfectant and gauze and bandages from his bag and knelt down beside her cot. She breathed calmly as he cleaned her wound; it wasn’t terribly serious, but without proper attention it would continue to reopen and likely become infected. The fear in his nerves became edged out by a comfortable familiarity as he wiped away blood and dirt and bandaged her ribcage.  
  
Something had fallen forth from beneath the neck of her shirt. A necklace – no, dog tags. He looked up at her face and she smiled. “Army,” she said. “And I’ve definitely already heard any possible joke you want to make.”  
  
“No, no…” he said quietly. “I wasn’t going to make any.” He tilted his head a little to read the name printed on them. “Amelia?” he said.  
  
She smiled, some light of relief sparking through her features. “Amelia.”  
  
He looked up at her and felt so happy to be able to say, “Rufus.”

 

* * *

 

He was quick on his feet, she had to give him that. There wasn’t much high ground to take, but Rufus had given her a boost up to a perch on a porch roof where she could cover him. This town had been quiet so far, but even the dead knew that old cliche at this point. He sprinted in to the drug store, satchel swung over his shoulder and axe in his hands. He was completely useless with a gun, but Amelia had to envy his upper-body strength.  
  
There was a rustle from a hedge and Amelia brought up her rifle. One of the dead emerged, pretty blue dress stuck with leaves and blood, shuffling into the street. She could take it out easily, but the gunfire ran the chance of attracting others. It took one step towards the drug store and she fired. Snap decisions always were the easier ones.  
  
Rufus emerged a few minutes later, only hesitating a moment at the sight of the crumpled corpse that hadn’t been there when he went in. He gave it a wide berth and returned to where Amelia was, holding out an arm to catch her as she hopped down. The first time he’d done that he’d ended up bonking her in the head with his axe. At least it hadn’t been the business end, and at least he was good at first aid.  
  
The trip back to the safehouse was uneventful, but Amelia still let out a breath of relief once they were behind reinforced doors. Rufus rubbed his hands over his face, too. Now, at least, it was safe to talk.   
  
“No trouble in there, right?” she said, resting her rifle against her shoulder. “I didn’t hear any commotion.”  
  
“No, nothing,” he said, and sat the satchel, which looked promisingly full, on the table. “You saw to that, it seems.”  
  
Amelia shrugged. “Didn’t want you to have a hard time,” she said, and came over to peer into the bag of supplies. “So, what’s the haul?”  
  
“Somewhat startlingly diverse. I think it’ll bear another few runs.” He opened the bag to let her look inside. Various tinned food products; some weird fruit-and-nut bars that she was beyond sick of; an assortment of painkillers, cough medicines, and other first aid supplies; tampons (god bless him and god damn how her body’s adaptive stress responses hadn’t shut that nonsense down yet); and in the corner of the bag, a fifty-count box of condoms.   
  
She peered at that particular addition to their supplies and then looked up at him, head slightly tilted. That was enough to make him incapable of eye contact as he started to speak. “You see, there are many survivalist uses for condoms.” That word delivered in his accent made her bite the inside of her cheek to keep a straight face. It sounded like some sort of evil Doctor Who robot. “They can be used to store water, or to wrap items that you need to be waterproofed in, they can substitute for surgical gloves in a pinch, they, well, surely you know how soldiers have used them to protect their gun muzzles…”  
  
Kept sand out like nothing else, in fact. She tapped her finger on the box. “They’re also pretty good for sex,” she said, and couldn’t keep the smile from twitching on to her face as Rufus’ eyes went wide and his cheeks turned pink. “Good call,” she said, and plucked out one of those awful granola bars to put in his shirt pocket. “You get a treat.”  
  
His face was still pink by the time he’d finished unpacking the supplies.

* * *

  
_The importance of boosties._

* * *

 The outbreak had hit some places harder than others. Those were the ones that were nearly ruined, scraped bare, nothing to be found there but corpses, those walking and those not. And then there were the towns where there had clearly been a successful evacuation. Those villages showed signs of rapid exit by the populace, but could have seemed normal, but for the silence and the stillness. The dead  were few, and easily dealt with.  
  
They’d committed quite a successful act of housebreaking on one promising little cottage, well fenced in and with an untended vegetable garden in the back. It’d clearly been planted just before things went to hell, and had managed to flourish without the bother of human hands. Amelia saw tomatoes and cucumbers and eggplants on the vines and jumped up and down for quite some time before throwing her arms around him in an embrace that was over before he could stop being too surprised by it to return it. His face, he had to imagine, matched one of the riper tomatoes.   
  
Out of sensible precaution they barricaded the doors and windows, and then while it was still light, raided the garden. Some of the vegetables were lost to insect infestation or pestilence (and Rufus supposed that eventually things might come to eating such things regardless), but there were plenty left that were edible. The bounty was not much, spread out on the counter in the house’s kitchen, but it was still amazing to see.  
  
Amelia’s eyes were Christmas-morning bright. “Okay, I know bad food. I know boring food. I was eating _Army_  food before this.” She picked up a tomato and brushed her small fingers around it. “You think I’d be dreaming of cheeseburgers and fries, that’s the cliche, but I’ve just been thinking about eating an entire bag of carrots and shitting orange for two days.”  
  
She did not have the most delicate way of speaking, Rufus had learned, but he couldn’t help but be charmed by it. “Vitamin deficiency, most like. Your body craves what it’s missing.”  
  
She let out a small chuckle, just a rise of her shoulders. “Yeah, I know how that goes.” She gave the tomato in her hand a grin and started to bring it to her mouth as though to bite into it like an apple. Rufus cast a glance around the kitchen and put out his hand to still the path of hers.   
  
“Just a moment, actually,” he said, and took the tomato from her. Whoever had lived here had been something of a decent cook, as he found a sturdy cutting board and a sharp knife quite easily. “If you could find some bowls, please,” he said, and while Amelia looked slightly perplexed, she began to search the cabinets.  
  
“I swear, everything I’ve ever needed in my life has been on a high shelf.” In the corner of his eye he could see her straining on her toes and then giving a small leap to retrieve two bowls. She set them down on the counter next to him, where he had begun cutting up a few tomatoes and cucumbers.  
  
“You cook?” she said, watching his hands as he worked the knife.  
  
“A bit,” he said. His trust in the stock of the pantry proved correct, and he found olive oil, vinegar, salt, and pepper. Amelia’s hand crept up to cover her lips as he watched him combine his assembled ingredients into the two bowls. He presented her one with a smile, retrieving a fork from a drawer. “It would be better with feta, of course, but one makes do.”  
  
“I think I’m going to cry,” she said, although she did nothing of the sort, instead eating with gusto. After the first bite she closed her eyes and bounced on her toes a little, and after the second she did a little spin in place. “I know that this has, like, no calories and no protein and is entirely useless from a survival standpoint,” she said, with her mouth full, “but not eating another can of fucking beans makes me happy enough to go kick dead guy ass all the way to the ocean.”  
  
Rufus smiled and took a bite himself. It was not his best culinary creation, but it wasn’t bad. He hoped he’d have the chance to do things properly again someday. “I’m glad,” he said, and they ate in silence in the dimming light coming through the high-set kitchen window.  
  
It was actually growing darker than it should have for the hour. Rufus peered out the window and could see dark clouds starting to roll in fast. Amelia took his empty bowl from his hands and put it with hers in the kitchen sink, then looked at what she’d done and laughed softly, shaking her head. “Old habits.”  
  
A roll of thunder shook the house then, enough to make him jump slightly and for her to grip the edge of the counter. “Hoo, okay. Guess it’s going to rain, huh?” She went to the door to the back garden and looked through the small window there. “Like, serious rain.”  
  
Not a minute later another crack of thunder rattled him and the sky opened, sheeting rain like it hadn’t since this all began. Amelia looked out the window, and then looked at him, grinning. “This is officially the best day.” She opened the back door and stepped outside, even as wind blew water in. He followed her quickly to keep the house from getting soaked.   
  
She had her fists raised in the air and her head back into the constant pour of water. He could tell she wanted to let out a whoop high to the heavens; she was biting her lip, and was American. That sort of thing was in their blood. “Dinner _and_  a shower. We’re probably going to get hit by a batallion of dead guys tomorrow just to cancel out how good this luck is, but I do  _not_  care.” That said, she pulled off her jacket and tossed it to Rufus, and then peeled off her already soaked shirt.  
  
She wore nothing underneath. She brushed her hands over her body, scrubbing off dirt and grime, and when one of them brushed over one of her small and undeniably quite lovely breasts, he realized he was staring and turned himself away. She paid him no heed, though. Her eyes were closed and she was smiling, taking the band out of her hair to run her fingers through it as it became more and more soaked.  
  
“This is only weird if you make it weird,” she said, and he supposed he must’ve been radiating an awkward discomfort strong enough to be felt five feet away. “Strip down, doc,” she said, and was thumbing open her trousers. “Don’t know when we’ll get a chance like this again.” She covered her face with her hands to muffle a small noise of happiness. “ _God_  it feels so good to be even a little clean.”  
  
She had a point, as uncomfortable as he was with the situation. He unbuttoned his shirt and felt the warm rain on his skin, dripping from his hair onto his bare neck. He caught it in his hands and scrubbed it over his face, and when he uncovered his eyes again, he saw that Amelia was down to just her underpants, stretching and bending to let water cover her as much as possible.   
  
Rufus decided he would keep his trousers on, for several reasons, but primarily for one increasingly hard reason. He held Amelia’s jacket and his shirt in his hand and kept them subtly clutched close to the front of his trousers. She seemed so happy, and he had absolutely no desire to be the one to make it weird, as she’d said.   
  
The torrent of rain lessened somewhat, and began to grow chill. Amelia lead the way back inside, still mostly nude, and dripped her way through the house until she found towels for the both of them. He let out a small breath when she’d wrapped herself up in one. She smiled up at him before piling her wet clothes into his arms. Amelia reached up to rub his cheek, fondly scratching her fingers through his damp beard. “Good day. Good day.”  
  
When he’d finished hanging up their clothes across the bathroom to dry, he found that she’d taken to one of the bedrooms, and was curled up asleep on top of the covers, wrapped in her towel. It would do, perhaps, to put a proper blanket on her. Instead he went to the other bedroom, lay atop the covers himself, and put an arm over his eyes to smell the rain on his skin.

* * *

  
_Rufus has a thing for ladies going natural._

* * *

“Oh my god,” Amelia said, her voice thick with horror. “Do you see that?” Rufus looked through the window. “Is that actually happening?”

One of the dead was lurching down the center of the street. He had a notable bite mark on his left arm, was completely nude and free of many of the signs of decomposition, and, ah, yes, the cause of Amelia’s alarm: he had a very large, erect penis.

“Ah,” Rufus said.

“‘Ah?’” she repeated, not quite taking her eyes off the tumescent member of the undead walking past their window. “That’s your reaction to a dead guy with wood?”

“It’s… it happens.”

“Bullshit,” Amelia said.

Rufus peered a little more through the window. “The genitals can become engorged with blood after death,” he said, feeling a rush of blood to his own cheeks. “And thus, an erection. It often happens with hangings.” Rufus looked a little closer at the dead man walking. “Look, there’s rope marks around his neck.”

“Wow,” Amelia said. “Must’ve gotten bitten and then tried to off himself, but it was too late.” She pursed her lips, fighting a smile. “Wow, poor guy. Never going to find a date.” She glanced over at Rufus. “This something you’ve seen before?”

He shook his head. “Med school stories, that’s all. My cadaver-handling days were a long time ago and not very eventful,” he said, then frowned. “Well, voluntary cadaver-handling.”

Their turgid friend shuffled his way out of view and Amelia stepped away from the window. For a moment she stared into space, as though contemplating something very serious, and then suddenly put her hand over her mouth as she began laughing hysterically.

“What?” Rufus asked. “What is it?”

It took her a while to catch enough breath to even speak.  "…zomboner…“ she managed to finally get out, and then sat down directly on the floor to bury her head in her arms and laugh and laugh.

Roughly fifteen seconds later, Rufus had joined her. After long enough that he needed to wipe his eyes, they’d both managed to come somewhat back to normal, breathing giddily hard. Amelia looked at him, her cheeks flushed pink and mouth grinning, and then her eyes got wide.

"Oh my god… _mourning wood!_ ” she said, and collapsed onto her side, laughing so hard this time she wasn’t even audible. Rufus’ cause of death, he thought as he fell back on to his back, would be via pun.

 

* * *

He can’t remember why he’d have a pair of needlenose pliers in the drawer with the tongue depressors, so he leaves them in there. Rufus closes the drawer because he remembers he doesn’t even need one of the depressors. His patient’s mouth is already easy to examine because his lower jaw is gone, tongue lolling out long like a slug onto his small throat. The boy’s mother stands behind him, mouth drawn into a sharp thin line. She has a hand between the boy’s shoulder blades, just to the edge of grabbing his neck with her lacquered fingernails.

“I told him,” she says. “I told him that if he thinks he’s going to miss school, he’s going to go to the doctor. I’ve had enough of him lying to me. I know he’s not even sick. He just wants to make things hard for me.”

Rufus smiles and leans down a little. The boy is sitting on the examination table, his legs dangling off with his seven toes bared. Even though the table is high, Rufus is tall, and he has to bend to come near the boy’s face. The children seem to like it. It makes him less intimidating.

“Well, if you’re not feeling well, sometimes the symptoms aren’t obvious,” he says, smiling and looking into the boy’s clouded eyes. “There’s a lot going on in the body we don’t understand. No one understands the body.” He puts his fingers on the boy’s cold throat, palpating the lumps beneath. “Oh, that is a bit swollen. That can’t feel comfortable, can it?” he says to the boy, smiling until his face hurts. The boy turns his head to press his upper teeth into Rufus’ forearm, an unsuccessful attempt at a bite.

Rufus nods sagely and says, “My prescription is absolutely no school, and lots of ice cream. That should fix you up right as rain.” His mother laughs like rain on a metal roof as the boy’s tongue weakly pushes up against his wrist as his teeth press down. Rufus tousles his hair with his other hand and smiles and smiles.

Rufus didn’t think he woke up with a gasp or a start, but he could feel his throat tight, the way it closed when you could only make high-pitched sounds. Rain was coming down on the corrugated tin roof of the shack, some of it leaking in through the corners to reawaken the smell of mildew. He sat up on his cot and curled his knees to his chest, putting his hands in his hair as he made himself breathe slowly.

“Are you okay?” Amelia said, her voice somehow disconnected and unreal across the small darkness between them.

Rufus briefly considered being sick. It would only be polite to do that outdoors, though, and he didn’t quite have a good enough feel of his legs to attempt that. He gulped in air instead and pushed the bases of his palms to his eyes, wiping away the tears that were brimming there.

“Hey,” she said again, tighter this time, concerned.

“A dream,” he said, and was startled by how hoarse his voice was. “Just… a bad dream.” He couldn’t shake it, the feel of cold skin under his fingers, a dry tongue pressed into his pulse. He laughed dryly and wiped his eyes again. “Stupid, sorry. Don’t worry about it.”

Amelia was quiet for long enough to make Rufus think perhaps she’d gone back asleep, paying no more mind to his demons. “Hey, lie back down,” she said, and he heard her get up. He settled back down, flat on his back and staring into the dark. “I promise this isn’t weird,” she said, and walked across the small shack to lie down next to him, her small frame filling in what space on the cot remained.

“Like this,” she said, and pulled at his arms and torso to position him. He felt like a rag doll and let her handle him. She placed his arms around her shoulders and hers beneath his, curling around so they both pressed gently on his spine, between his shoulders. She rested her cheek against his chest and squeezed him like that, a light pressure that settled over his heart.

She stayed like that without speaking for a while, and then let out a soft breath. “I’d see guys coming back on their second or third tour and they could get pretty fucked up. Not sleeping, bad dreams when they could. Not really surprising, but not good, either.” He could feel the little hum of her voice against the fabric of his shirt. “Sometimes stuff like this would help.” Rufus felt himself relaxing more and more with each passing moment. He let his arms go further around Amelia. She laughed a little into his chest. “And I don’t want you to think that was my job or anything, designated hug girl. It got pretty Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. Big army guy hugging his other big army guy buddy so he could get some sleep.” She sighed and tilted her head against him, her hair brushing beneath his chin. “It’d’ve been cute if it weren’t so damn sad.”

He let out a very slow breath. “Thank you,” he said. “This… yes, this helps.” He let out a sigh that made her hair ripple. “I feel ridiculous,” he said. “Everyone’s been through terrible things after all this.”

“Well, yeah,” she said. “That doesn’t make them less terrible.”

Amelia was small in his arms but something about her felt large then, enough to cover him over, to act for at least this amount of time like the blanket he’d put over his head when he was seven to hide from the bogeyman. She hadn’t asked, but he told her anyway. “The first people I saw affected in the outbreak were children,” he said. “Brought in to my clinic because their parents were worried about the flu. That they’d have to close schools.” Rufus laughed in a way that was just fighting the thickness closing around his throat. “The funny part of it was that it wasn’t even the first time my nurse had been bitten by a child. Kids can be little bastards sometimes.” His voice broke on the last word and he sealed his mouth tight, holding his breath and clenching his eyes shut.

Amelia pressed her hand to the back of his neck, her fingers warm and her nails short, and kept her ear to his chest, listening to his heart and whatever else needed to come from it that night. When he finally fell back asleep, he had no more dreams.

 

* * *

He’d picked her up to carry her and she’d wrapped her legs around his waist, feeling the bulge of his dick rub against her for a few good moments before he set her down on the still and powerless HVAC unit. “Not very comfortable, sorry,” Rufus said as he bent over her, a dumb, gentle smile on his face.  
  
“I can cope, seriously,” Amelia said, and grabbed at the collar of his shirt to pull him down for a kiss. He kissed her soft and sweet and tender, like they were somewhere other than a sealed up basement lit by a battery powered lamp, like she didn’t have metal grating poking into her back, like either of them could remember the last time they’d brushed their teeth. She curled her hand around the back of his neck and her legs around his waist again; she kissed harder than that.  
  
When his hands slid under her shirt and his fingers spread out over her ribcage, she pushed him away for a moment. “Hang on, hang on,” she said and wriggled out of her jacket. One of his hands felt along the slight curve of her waist while the other moved up her arm, trailing gooseflesh. He kissed her again and took hold of her discarded jacket, wadding it roughly up to form a makeshift pillow for her to rest her head on. She laughed.  
  
“Better?” he said. She stroked his cheek, feeling him smile beneath his whiskers.  
  
“Five star,” she said, and he was kissing her again. He pushed her shirt up beneath her arms. The collapse of society meant she no longer felt obliged to wear a bra, which meant he had immediate access to her nipples. He fluttered his fingers over one like a gliss on piano keys, making it stiffen and rise. Amelia grunted into his mouth and tightened her legs around him. His breath caught as she ground herself against his cock, and he broke away from the kiss to quietly groan against her cheek.  
  
He kept his head down, kissing her neck and heading further southward, and while that direction was good, very good, she wasn’t quite… “Hang on,” she said, and put her fingers into his hair to pull him back up for one more kiss, the kind that had her lifting her shoulders off the surface beneath her. “Okay, now go,” she said when she was done, and kept her hold into his hair as he breathed against her breastbone.   
  
He tongued at her nipple and she bit her lower lip, some strained sound coming from her throat. Silence was usually the rule for, well, everything, but the walls around them were very thick. It’d do her well to make some noise. She pushed Rufus’ head down against her body and he responded perfectly to suggestion, sucking hard, working it with his tongue. His touch over the other with his fingers was still feather-light, and the rougher touch of the broad pad of his thumb made her whole body jerk.  
  
She was impatient. She reached down between them to unfasten her pants, wiggling them a little off her hips before she plucked Rufus’ hand from her breast and aimed it downward. He made a low, rumbling noise against her chest as his fingers went beneath her underwear, curling in past her lips to dip in where she was already so wet.  
  
“Fuuuuuck,” she breathed out as he traced a fingertip around her clit, keeping his touch light for now. Once they’d done it where he’d held her up against a wall, her legs wrapped around his waist and his hand in her pants, fucking her so hard and so well with his fingers that she bit his shoulder hard enough to leave a mark when she came. Sometimes there just wasn’t enough time for a more delicate touch.  
  
His tongue was still swirling around her nipple, though, and there was definitely time for more of that kind of delicate touch. She tightened his hand in her hair and pushed it downwards as she uncurled her legs from around them, spreading them wide. “Okay, you go down now,” she said, and his beard tickled her belly as he nodded.   
  
Rufus’ fingers were wet on the skin of her hip as he tugged her clothing down, getting it past her hips before she gave him a light kick in his shin with her left foot. “Shoe, shoe,” she said, and he obeyed, pulling at the laces of her boot and tugging it and her sock off right away. She pulled that leg out of her pants as soon as she could and let them fall in an awkward dangle from her other leg. He looked at her and smiled, placing his hands on her inner thighs. He looked at her and knelt down before her.  
  
He licked her from bottom up, the end of his nose nudging her clit before he circled it with his tongue. Amelia bit her lip again and lifted her head up to watch him. His eyes were closed and his expression was peaceful, more relaxed and unfurrowed than he managed to be even when he was asleep. She breathed in harsh and slow while he took his time, leisurely exploring her with his tongue. It was good when they could take their time. Very good. Fantastic.

 

She tightened her hand in his hair and pushed his head in tight to her. “Okay, more now,” she said, and the little rumble she felt him make was probably a laugh. She had a limited amount of patience that needed to be save to apply to more life-and-death situations. His lips closed around her clit and she kicked at the metal beneath her, the heel of her boot making a clattering sound. Time to make noise.  
  
He buried his face deep between Amelia’s legs and licked her, sucked her, pushed in deep to taste the inside of her. He held one of her thighs with his hand partly to steady her, but mostly just to open her up more. She was panting hard now, making mindless, animal sounds to mingle with the obscene wet noises Rufus was causing with his mouth. Her inner thighs would be sore tomorrow and his beard would smell like her for at least a day. She came shouting and bucking, making the metal beneath her make noises like movie thunder.   
  
Rufus took the untwining of fingers from his hair as a sign to stop. She was too oversensitized now for any more direct touch, but he occupied himself with light kisses against her inner thigh, a nuzzle of his nose at the crease where her body met her leg. Amelia caught her breath, letting her own hand rest on her chest to feel the settling of her heart beat.  
  
She sat up, moving gracelessly and laughing at herself for it. She reached down to tap Rufus a little under the chin, and he rose back up to his feet. “Okay,” she said, and her voice was hoarse from how she’d shouted. She rubbed his cock through his pants, smiling as his eyelashes fluttered from the first second of her touch. “Your turn.”

 

* * *

As the euphoria of orgasm faded from his body, Rufus became aware again of the physical discomforts in his body. His lower back ached a bit from holding Amelia up like he had, he had a mild cramp in his right wrist, and an odd sharp pain where his left shoulder met his neck. He felt it with his fingers, and the soreness was in the shape of a small mouth’s set of teeth.  
  
“Did you… bite me?” he said. None of the dead had gotten near him recently (and many of them weren’t tall enough to reach such a location on him) and the skin wasn’t broken, so that was hardly a concern.  
  
Amelia popped up on the tips of her toes to look at where he tugged his shirt away to show her. “Oh, yeah, I guess I did.” She traced her fingertip around the bite and smiled up at him impishly. “Shit, you know what this means?”  
  
“What?” he said.  
  
She made her eyes wide and sincere, but she couldn’t quite get the smirk off her lips. “You’re going to turn into an American now.”  
  
Rufus stared at her blankly for a few moments, and then clutched his chest, bending over slightly. “My God, I… I…” He gasped raggedly for breath. “Truck. Flashlight. Cookie. _God help me, it’s already started!_ ”  
  
Amelia put her hand over her mouth to quiet her laugh, and then kissed him on the forehead. “Hey, there’s a bright side. Maybe now you’ll be able to actually shoot a gun.”

* * *

**BONUS:**  
  
_OBVIOUSLY IT SHOULD ALSO BE A VIDEO GAME._


End file.
